Zack Mosley [Film Festival 10.01.12] fantasy



A Werewolf Boy is your garden variety Boy And His Dog Story. Except in this case, the boy is a girl and the dog is a "werewolf." I use the term "werewolf" loosely. This particular lycanthrope's transformations are not dictated by the lunar cycles but by his own anger, so he is more like the Bruce Banner of the werewolf community. He also has the power to withstand falling I-beams, bend CGI to his will, and grow Dragonball Z hair in a single spurt.

But that about covers it. For most of this film's 122 punishing minutes he is simply a feral boy who bats his eyelashes and makes puppy dog noises at the one girl in rural South Korea circa 1965 who can see past his horrible hygiene issues. It would be cute if it did not simultaneously make me want to retch and fall asleep.


The story takes most of its cues from the Old Yeller playbook, so I don't feel I need to synopsize. Just close your eyes and envision the most generic way a young girl could come to love a smelly werewolf boy. But the film eventually chickens out on the Old Yeller ending. Instead of our girl Kim Sumi having to put her beloved werewolf boy Cheolsu down, he is simply chased off into the woods with a quivery bottom lip.

This gives rise to the most egregious of this film's many opportunities for editing (to employ a euphemism), a pointless present-day bookend subplot. Our girl Kim Sumi, now in her sixties, has raised a family in North America. She receives a call about something or other and journeys back to South Korea to see the old family farm house one last zzzzzzz

It all leads to a scene of weeping and blubbering in which (SPOILERS, but why do you care?) Kim Sumi reunites with the werewolf boy, who is still practicing horticulture in the kennel out back, just as young and eternally K-Pop handsome as ever. (And now able to speak. Bastard could have called.) Cue soap opera piano and soaring strings on the mercilessly shitty score.

Director Jo Sunghee impressed me in 2010 with his bizarre little pre-post-apocalypse feature debut End of Animal. That movie was aggressively weird. Short on plot but brimming over with style and atmosphere, it suggested a visionary behind the singularly odd vision. A Werewolf Boy is a total about face. It's straightforward and slick, manufactured for mass consumption. But it comes off the assembly line insipid. It's a tired rehash of Edward Scissorhands, without Burton's then-fresh art direction or Depp's quirky characterization. In other words, I'm sure all the big agencies in Hollywood are having sit-downs with Jo Sunghee as I type this.

Through the rigorously scientific process of anecdotal information, I do feel it is my duty to report that the crowd seemed mostly pleased. If you are looking for the South Korean version of a Hollywood-style a Boy And His Dog Story, this may hit your sweet spot. But make this exact movie in English, and the film festival crowd would complain that it was uninspired pap. Jo Sunghee will probably have a successful career if he sticks to this type of movie, but I would personally much rather see him return to his offbeat roots.

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